


The Waves, the Rising Tide

by moonymindpalace



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aging, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War II, Angst, BAMF Tony Stark, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Childhood Sweethearts, M/M, Period Typical Bigotry, Poetic, Spans over about 40 years, Spies & Secret Agents, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Tony Angst, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark-centric, poetic prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 08:15:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20811944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonymindpalace/pseuds/moonymindpalace
Summary: At 11, Tony runs away from school and falls in love with a boy from the docks with the sea in his voice. At 54, he bleeds out by the sea with the boy with the sea in his eyes holding him.





	The Waves, the Rising Tide

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Marina for being a great beta and understanding exactly what I wanted this story to be.
> 
> Written from 12.05.2019 to 25.08.2019.

Anthony put his hands in his pockets to pretend they weren’t shaking as the boy came close in the deserted street. The boy had no coat but a hat and his nose was very red.

Ay, are you lost?

The boy was no taller than Anthony, but he stood like the proud birds his father shot when they went upstate. Anthony wasn’t lost since he didn’t want to be found, and all lost things ought to be found, but not him.

Cat got your tongue?

Mrs. Galloway always scolded him for talking too much, and if only she could see him now. Not his dad, he’d scold him for not speaking up, Stark men must always speak and know all.

No.

Ay, he talks! C’mon, you ain’t from 'round here, what’s your name?

His dad called him boy, all the time, where’s the boy, come here boy. Maria called him Tony with a voice like cotton candy: soft and melting in her mouth before coming to, but Mr. Hendricks said that was no name for a decent man.

Anthony.

Right, Anthony. I’m James.

James was a decent man’s name but this boy would not please Mr. Hendricks with his very red nose and no coat and listing accent like a ship in the storm. Maria always got seasick but there was no other way to travel back to her country, at least now she wouldn’t have to travel back anymore. Anthony missed her like her cotton candy voice, gone before he could speak about it.

His father called him Anthony and Mr. Jarvis called him Master and he still missed Maria after Mr. Jarvis found him and took him back to school, leaving him to long for the James boy with his sea born voice and coarse hands like Anthony wanted his own to be.

Mr. Jarvis called him Master Tony when he too took the ship back to his country, and there was this great impulse to follow him unlike any Tony had ever felt.

It’s not your country for you to serve.

He wanted not to serve but to help, to put his coarse hands from the workshop to use and save people as he’d never been able at home no matter how many he saw sleeping at train stations and shop fronts and he wondered what had come to his James boy who worked at the docks.

*

Come now, Stark.

Agent Carter called him Stark, voice clicking like her heels and no-nonsense sharp like her lipstick. The man trailing after her kept his mouth shut but his eyes were something sad and stubborn just like hers.

Where did this guy come from, anyway?

Carter looked at him as if she thought him dumb.

He’s the super-soldier Doctor Erskine and Mr. Stark made in Brooklyn.

His dad had said the whole building shook with the power of the machine and Tony had wanted to be there less for the miracle man and more for the miracle machine he’d left blueprinted in '40 before leaving for Europe. That day he’d been halfway over Europe delivering his new Jerichos. The miracle man was like Carter but afraid in a way none of them were.

Captain Rogers had hands too soft to belong to a soldier and tried to hide recklessness with shyness. Anthony’s James still had his listing voice and coarse hands, now made rougher by the rifles and ropes from the trenches. Tony gave Rogers up to Carter who could understand past his solemnity and kept James for himself as they came and went. James was Barnes or Sarge or Bucky, all the voices different textures and accents, but to Tony he was forever James, rolling down his tongue through his teeth to call the sun-kissed July sea he missed in that ashy city.

*

The trees were singed on top, the air sweetness of smoke and pines with the sour of gun powder.

Are we lost?

James was now taller than him but no longer proud, something the others did not know and Rogers did not want to see etched to his spine, making him look lost, as all lost thing ought to be found and Rogers had found him strapped to a table, lost to all and himself.

Stark, are we lost?

The forest grey, dead. Rogers burning with the miracle of the serum and the machine.

If you walk northeast for an hour, you’ll find the point. I’ll stay and put the plane back on the air.

On your own?

The shield was his dad’s prototype and his own making, a miracle of serum and machine holding a miracle of a metal so rare not even Starks had to spare.

Yes, you don’t have a man to spare in a task I can do myself.

We’ll stay until you’re back up.

And lose daylight? Get out of here, Captain, I need to think, and your frown is distracting me.

Tony put his hands on his pockets, looking for some tools. Hands as coarse as his own opened the plane's fuselage, the emergency toolbox, reached for the hatch under the left wing. They worked in silence, the others long gone, the sun a slow candle dripping over the dead needles.

If we were back home, I’d ask you to the Park.

The Park would not agree with James, his coat would be too thin, his eyes too sharp.

No. The ferry.

Why the bloody ferry, Tony?

Maria used to get seasick, Jarvis never did. James probably wouldn’t, not now, after the shipping and the trenches and Azzano.

You should be close to the sea.

When the plane went up James sat with him. The singed trees looked snowed in the night, his hands unfeeling on the controls.

Stevie looks good by the sea.

The sea would fit his sad eyes and sandy hair alright and bring colour to his lips. Still, the waves belonged to James, to his voice and resilience, to the quirking of his lips, smile listing like a sinking ship, to the movement of his hips, to the way he called Tony’s name, strong then dim, close then gone, to his song inside Tony and his body falling down a snowed ravine.

*

This Sargent again. I had to tell Rogers first he was dead, then he wasn’t, and now you. Here I thought Rogers was the only mule amongst us, well, he’s a Catholic, after all, them bloody Irishman just don’t know how to quit, Carter told me he’s trying to drink himself stupid, not in these words of course, she’s a lady, but he’s there trying and failing, like the stubborn Irishman he is. But here I thought you had more brains than him, Stark.

Tony was lucky he hadn’t been forced to enlist or he’d get a court-martial for his _Ave Maria, Gratia Plena_ right to Phillips face. Carter thought it funny. Rogers was apparently still on the bombed-out bar and Tony dared not join him, if he had a drop, he’d never get sober again.

If you get the reports and edit them to make him M.I.A. I’ll work the rescue myself.

Why? Not even Steve thinks he’s alive.

She called Steve the way Tony called James, as if afraid to say it too loud.

Rogers is blind to what he doesn’t want to see, Agent. The reports, please.

For days the whole world was snow and Jarvis, a quiet litany of Mister Stark, the taste of rations, the numbness of hands digging through the ice. He went back and left something of himself at the bottom of the ravine.

What do you mean there was no body?

I mean, Rogers, that we searched the whole place, no matter if he went straight down, a little to the left, a little to the right, he’s not there, there are no tracks, he’s not in the ice, the water is too shallow, there’s not even a drop of blood. Just snow.

So, he’s not dead?

He’s not where you left him and that’s a big fall. Someone got there before us and took him, dead or alive it doesn’t matter, they took him back to experiment on him.

The Captain’s bunk wasn’t pristine, he had papers strewn everywhere, drawings to suit his soft artist hands, books, the shield against the foot of the bed.

But it must mean he’s alive, why would HYDRA get a dead soldier to experiment on?

C’mon, Cap, really. Try to think.

No need to rub your genius on my face, Stark.

I’m asking you to think because you’re a clever man, do you _really_ never thought anything changed after the 107th was captured? Was Barnes always that way? Running on little to no sleep, eating just rations but getting all buffy, able to shoot from ridiculously far? They experimented on him, Steve, and he survived the table, of course they want to know how, now.

Rogers never seemed to trust him. Still those days they got along better and the captain not once asked why was Tony grieving so much for a soldier he only met once a month. Perhaps he knew the truth and refused to acknowledge it, as was his style. Tony was the one strapping his uniform now, his soft hands blistering and healing under Tony’s coarse skin. Carter’s skin was rough too when Tony held her hand while Rogers put the monstrous bomber on ice, shouting coordinates until his last second.

The silence on the line sealed one more of Tony’s failures. They won their small war and went on to win the big world war, flew over the empty shell of the bombed-out Berlin. His dad was prouder of the _bomb _than of him, satisfied in his hunger for destructive machines with thousands obliterated in a blink.

Home was lost to him, Jarvis back to calling him Master Tony, the house too small for two misters. He had left a boy to follow Jarvis and come back a man to follow no one, Maria back from her country but when Tony went to her found nothing of his mom. Home had him lost to their laws and paranoia.

*

The ice the plane was on reminded him of huge brutal teeth ready to devour them all, the man frozen under it a pitiful prey curled up clutching at a closed compass, blood-caked still on the side of his blonde head.

I’m sorry we couldn’t find him earlier.

Peggy’s curls bounced as she walked in front of him.

Tony. It wasn’t your fault.

She called him like warm brandy, Tony, like a single syllable, a single motion of her red lips. It wasn’t his fault, but it was too late for them now, Peggy’s dance given to someone else.

The workshop in Brooklyn had more scars than his own hands, blowtorch scorches, mishaps with sharp ends, small and big explosions. A thawed miracle of chemistry and machines that looked nothing like the miracle his dad had dropped in Japan. This Rogers would never fit the seashore, but they went anyway, Rogers fitting the stormy sky of November, the jagged icy wind like the teeth of the ice beast that held him for five years.

Why didn’t you leave me there?

Tony owed it to James, the ghost living inside of him, the failure he never fixed.

If the Soviets found you they could try reverse engineering your serum. Or they could get the cube.

I didn’t have the cube anymore.

I know. We fished it out a couple of months ago while searching.

You should’ve left in the bottom of the ocean, Stark.

This Rogers was fit for the frothy waves crashing on the pier wall, barely contained in their anger. The waves belonged to James and now they belonged to Rogers, to the come and go of the shield, to the rise of his temper, to his hesitance and bluntness. This Rogers called him like a compromise.

His father looked at him as if suspecting, of which of the many secrets he now had he could not know. They hid the cube somewhere only Pepper knew, not even himself, not even Steve, not even Peggy.

It’s been eight years.

The future was bright and bleak, things all still a little the same, the failures hurting deeper because in the future everything should work. Peggy went back to London to meet the new Queen, but they all watched the coronation on the television.

It’s been eight years, Tony. You need to let go of him.

He did not try to deny. If anyone knew, it should be her.

How do you know it’s him?

Steve might be blind to what he doesn’t want to see but I’m not. Sargent Barnes would want you to move on.

Long ago Tony had thought miracles incorruptible. Miracles that could not go amiss and ruin, scorch the earth with power of the purest strength, that would not bend to the selfish. Steve was a power to unite and a power to divide, to tear through like the tempest he had always been.

The weather stood nice enough for the test on the new prototype just as Pepper came back from Europe, the new miracle that would make amends of the old misguided forces, power through crops and homes and cars, would make the world single as it had never been for the Emperors and Führers and Parties and Generals wanted conflict sowed and reaped from the blood of a million men. For no matter Rogers and officers and fathers he would not bow to a few to turn his back to many, would not live in fear of the miracle he’d found under the ever-surviving waves of resilience.

*

Rogers was good, Erskine and the prototype made him great. That greatness now lived on the earth made fruitful. Tony would never be great for it belonged to those capable of forgetting and he was not made for it. The seas calmed in the summer and they too, the waves that once were to James now to Rogers, who tasted like miracle and regret, all Tony could ever be made for.

The ship of Steve’s accent never listed, it rumbled and dragged the froth, it called him like a fact, immovable through the tides as he had become, his laughter a tide so strong rolling them along the rivers under the bridges of past regrets, towards the grey ocean all people of America swam on and pretended to not see the oil stains, the pale bloated bodies of a thousand soldier spies, red and blue the same. His own hair slowly fading to a grey the same as his father’s suited the decade-old dog tags around his neck to make for the ring they could never have. His hands harsher and harsher the same as his heart, dirty from the Pigs, reaching out for the sky, trembling in a submarine in the Caribbean. Submarines did not list the way ships did, the way Steve’s voice did when his body of miracle turned hot under Tony’s hands, as he loved the gleaming waves and the crashing storm, his boy and his miracle.

Steve called, his voice desperately trying to push through the storm, to tell them the President was dead too. No hand had pulled Howard’s trigger and the hand on the President’s trigger was a sham. The report on Peggy’s desk was thick the way the Howlies used to make them back in their war and she maneuvered it out of their reach. Steve’s hair was thinning on the sides and suited his new rank, the strands of medals on his dress uniform. Less and less he was the sea, the crashing of his temper seasoned with time for a watchful assertiveness, a river strong enough to carve a valley in Tony’s soul not even an earthquake could displace. His sinuous accent a caress taking them to the water of a final understanding.

*

The Brooklyn house was empty with Steve away at D.C. for the week. He walked down the stairs to the basement bunker, put his hand to the cold steel wall. The floor was concrete but could as well be drenched sand from the bank of the Thames they had kissed for the first time, he and James. There was a red star on the report, the folder heavier than it had been the year before, and a photograph of a man on a metal table. James’s hand had been rough like his own on his face, pulling his chin up.

_Ay, look at me._

Pepper and Jarvis found him with his face to the wall. He could not face a world where his beautiful summer sea with eyes of wonder was turned into another miracle machine of bloodshed, senseless in destruction as his father’s creation had been. The earthquake of pain carved Steve’s valley deeper into him, severed him body and soul into the two halves the men he loved owned. There was a snowed in ravine, there was a buried bunker, there was blood on his chest, there was the Winter Soldier, a hand around his throat.

The hand was metal, shiny, naked, pushing breath and mind out of him. He followed James down a snowed ravine, their bodies twisted and missing some parts. Winter in New York had always been grey snow turning to slush by the sidewalk, he followed James down a snowed street, their bodies trembling.

_So, Anthony, what’s you doing up here?_

_I was looking for a ship._

Tony. Steve called him like nothing, only pity. Tony, I know I never asked-

_I was looking for a ship._

_Well, this ain’t the docks._

_Yes, I do have perfectly good eyesight, thank you very much._

_I ain’t saying you’re blind._

_You were saying the obvious. What time is this?_

_Do I look like I’ve got a watch?_

Tony, I know I never asked but you and Bucky. Did you-

_Do I look like I’ve got a watch? I mean, you do, why have you no watch?_

_Mrs. Galloway doesn’t allow us boys to have them, she says the bell should be enough._

_Do they sound the bell when is time to go home?_

_What? No! They sound in the morning after breakfast, then between classes, then before dinner._

_And you boys don’t go back?_

Tony, I know I should wait until we’re back home, but I need to know if you ever-

_You never go home?_

_Just for Christmas and Summer._

_And what’s this ship you’re looking for?_

I was looking for a ship, Steve, and his accent was like a ship in the storm, waving from side to side, like yours does but you push through, James just went with the waves, you understand me?

He closed his eyes. The sweet oil used on the engine an accent to the smell of sweat, gunpowder, gas. He’d always worked backwards, never relayed on his sight. _Yes, I do have perfectly good eyesight, thank you very much_. Rumble of motor, silky fabric of his tie. Haltering stutter of Steve asking time and time again what he should have seen twenty years before.

Yes, we loved each other.

Like you love me?

The ocean ran under them, a mass of weight, pressure, life and death in a single body. They ran over the sea, smooth flight pushing through the wind, unfeeling, unstoppable.

More.

*

Bucky? Steve called like the plea of a drowning man, lungs heavy, shoulders heavier with the shield. Bucky you know me, it’s Steve.

This Steve was no miracle but the force of a man child that fit the seashore, a relentless tide of the faith Tony never had, and James had lost to the trenches. This James was nothing, his voice barely a scratch of loose words in as many languages as one could count, lost. The Winter Soldier was the taste of metal and gunpowder, but this James was nothing at all, only Steve’s relentless faith and Tony’s timeless failure.

Tony, please.

Peggy’s heels clicked as if they were protesting birds furious at the weather, they were black and her coat light brown and the dying yellow light swallowed her. She called him that old way, two clicks of her tongue, a press of her lips.

You’ll forgive me, Director Carter, I know I’m not an operative, but as one of the founding members-

Will you-

As one of the founding members, I would like to know _why_ Operation Star Crossed has been moved to Colonel Rogers.

Her heels clicked again, away from the light on the desk, through the safe door. Air old and still broke to the click of the heels on her feet and of the tags on his chest.

Why do you want to keep this OP?

We both know Steve isn’t that wise when it comes to his emotions, he’s convinced all it takes is his face and some time for James to get his memories back. They’ll only hurt themselves.

I know.

Then why?

We need Steve to focus somewhere else for a while. The situation is dreary, Tony, the Soviets used a presumed dead American prisoner of war to assassinate the President, if the government knows-

It’s as good as a declaration of war.

Exactly. One way or another they’ve won, President Kennedy is dead, so we must avoid further damage at all costs. And as we both well know Colonel Rogers isn’t the best at avoiding damage.

*

Bucky, look, I brought Tony today. Remember Tony?

Steve’s pleas turned pitiful then desperate, the Winter Soldier a shadow in the bunker of their Brooklyn home, ageless and vacant where Steve’s eyes crinkled and overflowed with the grief of his five decades of fighting.

He’s been through a lot, we just have to be patient.

Tony nodded, laying on his back in the white infinity of their bed, fingers tracing where Steve’s tags would be if they weren’t around Tony’s neck. They had been patient for nearly four years, with the double agent Peggy assigned having little or nothing to report back.

Both James and Steve were drying away under their watch, the Winter Soldier an empty shell, even the compressed violence he had written in his body gone, Steve scarred from inside out from the fruitless struggle.

Pepper found a doctor, an expatriate. I think it’s time for us to step back and let a specialist handle the case.

In their years of temperance, Tony had forgotten the force of the storm living inside Steve that would rush through the valley of his heart, unstoppable, destructive like fire. They met the double agent in a yacht in the Mediterranean, the European sun a million ways different from what Tony remembered on her deep red hair when she looked around the room before handing the folder to Pepper. The waves softly crashing on the hull had nothing to the wild tempest building on Steve.

Tony, Pepper called, pure and straight like her hair, I can’t read the blueprints.

It dawned on him like a shot of poorly brewed whiskey, cold then scorching then a bottomless pain. Pepper was his best friend, his backup, the only other person he’d taught how to read Soviet, Chinese and Japanese made projects. He’d never found the strength to teach her how to read Hydra made. Her hand came to clutch at his wrist. The double agent nodded.

This technology is unknown to the Red Room and the Committee both, and simultaneously it looks similar to blueprints and notes the German made in the early forties. Whoever kept the Winter Soldier on the bunker you found was using stolen machinery, or, more likely, has a previously unknown tie to the Nazis.

Engineering had laws but some scientists left traces, fingerprints of their genius on the designs. His father’s was easy to see, the flounder for spectacle, and someone once said his own was a passion for streamlines instead of angles. Those designs were no works of art, their parts speaking of the sadistic power of machine over human. Designs meant to turn a man into an empty shell of violence, wipe him of time and place but keep his body intact.

What happened to Zola?

Captured 1944, handed over from the SSR to the Allied Forces, indicted and found guilty of human experimentation, torture, and crimes against humanity in 1947 in Nuremberg.

Steve’s breath short and agitated as if he still had asthma hit the side of Tony’s neck while Pepper talked and yet he made no move to comfort him.

He was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment, died in 1949 from a stroke.

Tony looked back at the folder, the fine paper of the blueprints softly flapping against the thick report pages and photographs.

Did he?

Did he what, Tony?

Steve sounded tired. Tony knew he hated being over open water, hated enclosed spaces made of metal, hated to be reminded the blunt force of his will couldn’t fix the world.

Did he die? If Hydra could make a man who fell off a cliff from a moving train survive and keep him under wraps, why wouldn’t they fake Zola’s death? This is his design, I’d recognize them anywhere, the alignment of the power source, the lack of security failsafe because he never manned them himself, the multiple versions of the cryogenic chamber he was in already testing in 1942. The arm isn’t his, but the rest is, and some of them date back to six years ago. What’s the only way to escape life imprisonment, anyway?

Tony, this is science fiction, even if-

Mr. Stark is right. The double agent's voice was raspy in a way that suggested damage, not accent, it came up like gravel under boots, as if she was about to lose it entirely. Sargent Barnes' survival sets a precedent for Hydra's capacities, we mustn’t rule out a fake passing of a man who would be, now, their leader. It fits another point I brought forward to the Director early into the investigation.

Her face closed off, full lips pressing, eyes locked on Tony as if trying to wordlessly tell him something.

The Soviets don’t want war, do they?

She shook her head. Pepper’s hand in his arm tightened.

The Committee wants total war as much as your government does, they all know neither side would factually win. Assassinating a president sounds much-

Like sowing chaos to reap war.

*

Tony found Doctor Yinsen a good companion, even if Steve still resented him. The man called him Stark the way the officers used to, a single whip of a syllable, and his rough hands were able to reach past their fears.

The machine left his neural network severely damaged, of course, but with the serum Sargent Barnes should have been able to heal brain matter and neurons in the last couple years. My guess is that the more he physically recovers the more he remembers, and therefore the deeper the psychological trauma settles in.

Yinsen's hands were the first to reach James on a pool of blood and warped steel, the metal arm ripped to pieces. His blood of salt and iron, bitter, pungent like Steve’s voice.

Tony moved them all, the workshop the doctor the butler the assistant the damaged soldier, left behind the brownstone hideout and the tempestuous river he’d found his home in for decades for a new shore, one called Pacific but known for its strength, and still he kept the tags around his neck, refused to move away from the half gone promise of Steve’s loyalty.

We’re close to the sea.

The profile of James’s face was stark against the window facing the cliff, but of course he knew the ocean was below them. His voice gravel under boots like the double agent’s, ice cracking over dark water, static.

Yes, we’re in Malibu, California.

What time is it?

Four a.m.

We weren’t here before, were we?

Until last week we lived in New York.

I forgot.

The ice cracked; his voice gone. Tony’s eyes followed the flickering glow of the small reactor he struggled to build and power a new arm for James, one with no timed poison build in, one that wouldn’t hurt.

Me too. Today- yesterday- I asked Steve for a glass of water.

Who’s Steve?

James called Steve like a whisper, like it hurt. Yinsen said it was his mind's self-defence keeping the past away.

My partner, he’s living somewhere else now.

*

The new arm was a little lighter, made of one of the alloys they had used for the Apollo, the ARC reactor replacing the red star and whirring steadily the same blue of James’s eyes.

How does it feel?

A maze of scars moved along the whine of metal joints. Snow crunched in the Californian summer.

Good.

One small step for a man-

She said it seriously, but her freckled nose told of her amusement.

Stop it, Pep.

I’m proud of you.

I’m just glad we didn’t need to use the cube.

He severed his last tie: the government believed he had nothing left after sending men to the moon. The reactor filling up his days and nights, a promise of his half-forgotten dream from before wars and failed partnerships, Pepper at his side protecting and unforgiving, hoping for the best but ready all the same to cushion his fail. Steve no longer called, his picture only an echo of his face on the papers, never on the TV. They heard of the slow withdraw from Vietnam, of Libya, of the NPT and the new president of Chile, but they never once heard from New York. They watched footage of over a hundred soldiers cry the injustice of war to a country they no longer believed in, and that winter there was no word from New York still, no remark on the irony of this cry of agony sharing a name with their own reborn soldier.

James watched them all, hair chopped off and face drawn, silver fingers clutching silver tags he found abandoned in a drawer in Tony’s room, a name slipping from his lips from time to time, always a whisper for a man that no longer thought of them.

There were no answers to their questions, the enemy lost to the greatness of a war that engulfed the world while Tony worked, only a tickling fear reminding them it existed beyond the borders of their Pacific cliff. The summers were bright, and the winters muted like the whisper James called until he stopped calling at all and instead asked about the sea and the ships he could see from their roof.

The reactor sang softly enough to put Tony to sleep, James so very still on a chair by the bed but their hearts beating still and strong in time with the come and crashing of the sea.

I keep remembering you by the docks.

I was looking for a ship.

Did you ever find it?

Did he? He’d found the listing of the waves, once, and the fury of a thousand storms, his heart made from salt and ice, his body sand and metal, falling, burning from a pain too strong to be natural as the crashing of the sea gave away to a terrible noise so vicious it was noiseless and the ground beneath them collapsed like the sand from the beach underneath, a wall of fire barraging between them, James close then gone, his song inside Tony and Tony’s body falling down an exploding cliff.

_Anthony ran when the other boys turned the corner for the great hall, praying with all he had the old gatekeeper would be inside because it was already cold for an October night, ran through the streets until he saw the bigger avenue, ran down the sidewalk bumping with the businessman and praying with all he had none of them was his dad, even if his dad would hardly recognize him, ran until he could smell the sea and the wind threatened to carry him from his feet and only stopped when he could no longer tell North from South and all there was to him was this boy with no coat and a red nose, Mrs. Galloway’s phantom voice calling out his name, Mr. Hendrick’s phantom hand smacking the back of his hand for being such an evil boy._

The boy was proud and was bad like him, he was sure, and the boy held him as he bled by the sea, eyes the same colour as the water, and he would never find that ship because who he wanted wasn’t in it, the ones that could mend him were right there and miles away somewhere by the Atlantic, a ship sinking under the weight of the storm he couldn’t help but love even in hate, taking him away from the boy drop by drop and for once he felt seasick like Maria used to, the crash of the waves stronger, merciless, as fatal as his heart still beating in time with his reactor, his last song for this word, this river of blood, blood like his own soaking the beach sand, James with his face burnt and hands red the way the enemy wanted them to be, their hearts singing the cacophony that belonged to them, wet, stubborn, resilient-

-until Tony’s beat no more.

**Author's Note:**

> Written with Arctic Monkey's American Sports, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and Golden Trunks; Keane's The Iron Sea, Sea Fog and Myth. Edited with Muse's The Void.
> 
> Some of the historical references are rather obscure, in case of confusion call me in the comments or on my twitter [@albusxx](https://twitter.com/albusxx).


End file.
